Twentythree ninjateen
by Ashen Rose
Summary: For most college students the main thing on the agenda is finals, not failing classes, and partying.One girl has a few other things on her mind, however, finishing her last fanficiton being one of them.What happens when a freak storm mixes it up a bit?


This is the first story i've posted on for a loooong while, and quite frankly i feel kinda bad about not posting things here.

It's fairly poorly written, as it's just something i came up with out of my head a little while ago and didn't really bother to proofread past spelling, so forgive me on that count, please!

And i'm not sure if i plan on finishing the other stories as of yet--i've got things written for some of them, but they just don't really do it for me right now.

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_There would be hard times ahead, this they knew. But they would also get through it. Of this Gaara was sure._

_If there was anything he had learned to trust over the years it was that if you believed it, you could truly make it happen._

Grinning to herself, a dark blonde girl clicked save and closed the screen to her dark-green laptop. Looking around to make sure she wasn't being looked at, she picked up the fairly heavy appliance and left the café, paying for her half-eaten bagel on the way out.

"I can't wait to post this!" She whispered to herself, hugging her laptop tightly against her chest. At five feet eleven inches she was one of the taller girls in her college courses—well, if you didn't count the seven or so basketball girls, but there weren't many classes with them in the first place—and tended to get stuck out of the group when things were happening.

But that was okay, because she had books, manga, and most important of all her laptop, which supplied her with the first two as well as access to what she deemed the most important thing in her life right now; Fanfiction. Those related to Naruto characters in general as well as a few random others, and a certain red-haired Kage in specific.

If she wanted to be honest, she could say that she really, really liked Gaara as a character and just wanted him to find happiness in any way he could. But if she wanted to be truthful she'd fallen for the anime character like any average fangirl of his would, and was extremely jealous that it seemed everyone she knew on the net had always been able to write better stories than her when it came to….well, anything.

She hoped she could at least impress them with her latest and final installment to the Gaara-Hanabi pairing story she'd been working on for the past year and a half with them. It had been one of the most challenging stories she'd ever written, and it was kinda sad for her to think about the ratio of nights spent on actual work versus the story, with the story winning three to one.

So preoccupied with her thoughts, she didn't notice the sudden change in atmosphere that normally preceded one of the strange little college town's freak storms, though she did notice as a wet raindrop splattered across her nose.

"Ack!" Sufficiently brought back into the present, the twenty-something female scanned the area around her frantically. Her shared dorm room apartment wasn't anywhere near close enough for her to reach in time to prevent both her and her laptop from becoming soaked—she did have a backpack but it was far too full as well as too small to fit it in--and there weren't any shops nearby that she could duck into for safety either.

Eyes landing on an ancient and gnarled tree across the street, she barely checked for passing vehicles—like there'd be any at this time of day, there were either people at home relaxing and sleeping, or at night classes in the college—before jaywalking straight across, and sitting straight underneath one of the larger branches of the tree as she leaned against its trunk.

Closing her eyes and sighing in relief as the rain picks up and she's still safely dry in her spot underneath the tree, the forest-green eyed girl leaned her head against the trunk, fingers playing with the tab that opened up the screen of her laptop absentmindedly.

'_Aren't you supposed to stay away from tall trees when it stormed?_' She belatedly wondered as lightning crashed close by, before shrugging it off. '_Oh well, what are the chances of it actually hitting a tree that a person's under, versus all the other taller things everywhere around here?_' As if to prove her point, she looked around to find something taller than the tree.

Sweatdropping when she found nothing, she glanced back up at the tree again. _'maybe I _should_ move…._' She thought belatedly, getting up to tuck her laptop underneath her shirt just as lightning struck the tree she'd just been leaning against.

"EEEEEeeeeeee!" Screaming, she dropped to her knees with her hands covering her ears long after the impromptu light show had gone again to terrorize another tree somewhere else along the street. Slowly bringing her head up, she felt a rush of anxiety that started off a round of nervous giggles that caused her to have to bring her hand to her lips to stop, before standing.

"Everthing's….fine. Yes, I'm not hurt…" A quick once-over confirmed it. "I wasn't actually struck or I'd have been in some sort of pain, right? Right. Okay, time to go home." The freak storm had already started to pass, the rain thinning out to a mere drizzle as she turned around to survey the actual damage of the tree.

"Woahmigod!" Eyes widening, she stepped back from the charred mass that had been the old oak tree, but was now two split halves on either side of a hole where the trunk used to be. "That—that could have been me!" Human curiosity got the better of her almost immediately as she stepped forwards to get a better look at the ruined trunk.

Her foot slipped, her eyes widened as she slid and started to fall headfirst onto the trunk, and she passed straight through.

The wood sizzled and it was almost as if the fatal wound struck by the lightning had never happened, the tree repairing itself to the point of being a few years younger than it had been before the lightning strike.

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Well, what do you think?


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